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There is now a video of Cliven Bundy, the white, seditious, militia darling of Fox News, sharing his folksy wisdom about "the Negro".

As I wrote here, there is nothing new or surprising about Bundy's racist remarks about how African-Americans were better off under slavery. Such specious claims are standard Right-wing talking points.

The nobility of black servitude, and how freedom ruined African-Americans, is not a lie that is advanced only by white conservatives. Black conservatives are the tip of that spear: they are human chaff whose sole purpose is to advance the agenda of the White Right by systematically denying the reality of white racism.

Myshkin, one of our frequent commenters, offered up a nice list of potential talking points that will be rolled out by conservatives in their efforts to defend Cliven Bundy--or at the very least to suggest that he is "misunderstood".

My favorite of his suggestions is:

Ben Carson: "Those PC liberals are going to try to hang up Cliven Bundy for what they perceive as racism. Mr. Bundy comes from a different time and a different place and he is only saying what he sees as problems in the black community and he is RIGHT, they were better as slaves! .... wait... Obamacare is slavery."

Bundy's comments about the merits of the Mexican family will also be a nice addition to the Right-wing echo chamber's defense of his anti-black racism. Their logic: how can Cliven Bundy be a "racist" when he has such admiration and "respect" for hardworking Mexican immigrants and their traditional family values?

Which boot licking, political blackface, shucking and bucking black conservative Uncle Tom will be the first to be trotted out by their white masters to defend Cliven Bundy? Their bench is pretty deep; hating black people for the amusement and pleasures of white conservatives is a very lucrative trade.

Allen West is a leading contender here. There is no claim, however miserable, racist, and inaccurate that he will not support. West is an African-American mercenary for the White Right.

Ron Christie enjoyed playing the "my best friend is black" role for Paul Ryan when the latter was called out for his public embrace of white nationalist race scientist Charles Murray. Christie is a solid, if not underwhelming, performer.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, "the worst negro in the history of the world", likely agrees with Cliven Bundy's views about the black family and slavery. Of course, Thomas is too high-profile to publicly support and defend Bundy. However, Thomas, the most accomplished and preeminent self-hating Uncle Tom black person of his era, may one day cite Bundy in a Supreme Court decision that further overturns voting rights for people of color.

I believe that Jesse Lee Peterson will be the bought and paid for black conservative who steps up in this moment, using this opportunity to add a spirited embrace of Cliven Bundy's racism to his resume.

Pastor Manning is also a contender as well. I would not be surprised if he made a pilgrimage out to Bundy's ranch.

The political black face routine offered up by black conservatives is a genre of performance which is dominated by men. Could Cliven Bundy provide an opportunity for an aspiring self-hating Negress to steal the shine from her black conservative brethren? A handkerchief head wearing black conservative woman could be a powerful novelty act as she makes her rounds on Fox News and elsewhere.

What self-hating black conservative do you think will be the first to publicly defend Cliven Bundy?

56 comments:

KissedByTheSun
said...

It better not be Ben Carson. As a Seventh Day Adventist he belongs to a church who believes that God blessed a white women named Ellen White with the gift of prophecy. A woman wrote quotes like this to other white SDA's in the late 1800's "Are we not under even greater obligation to labor for the colored people than for those who have been more highly favored? Who is it that held these people in servitude? Who kept them in ignorance?... If the race is degraded, if they are repulsive in habits and manners, who made them so? Is there not much due to them from the white people? After so great a wrong has been done them, should not an earnest effort be made to lift them up?"

And this "The American nation owes a debt of love to the colored race, and God has ordained that they should make restitution for the wrong they have done them in the past. Those who have taken no active part in enforcing slavery upon the colored people are not relieved from the responsibility of making special efforts to remove, as far as possible, the sure result of their enslavement."

I know WARN isn't a forum for religious types and I'll probably be lumped into the conservative nut job pile. However, I want to show that in the case of Ben Carson he has to do some serious mental gymnastics to side with a group that says things that Carson was raised to believe that God Himself condemned. You can go to whiteestate.org to find these and a whole host of Ellen Whites quotes.

I think conservatives will handle it by just brushing it off. They don't see anything wrong with a few personal prejudices, they're like a victimless crime. They'll likely talk about how the left is trying to deflect attention away from the tyrannous government and then ignore anything else about it.

I have been laughing since I heard about this yesterday morning. This is hilarious.

How can we (or you or others) make it relevant?

Given that Paul Ryan and Phil Robertson have basically said the same thing in the past few months, there should be some instructable points in their overt/covert racism. Of course the right feels his racist attitude is irrelevant to anything, demanding accountability of someone who says/does something racist is like demanding the sky change from blue to green.

I was never interested in debating Bundy's land dispute or his standoff with the federal government. I think his racism and white privilege would be a far bigger and more important conversation than an "abusive" federal government. People of color have dealt with the tyranny of federal state and local governments and the everyday individual prejudices of your average American for centuries.

In that video, Kira Davis keeps babbling about "taxes," but Mr. Bundy's dispute with the government has nothing to do with taxes. She can't even be bothered to get the basic facts right, but that is not unusual with conservatives.

I'd argue Herman Cain beat Kira Davis by posting on his site and tweeting a link to an article titled "Thuggish government not such a big problem now that Cliven Bundy is a racist" which pretends everything about Bundy (sovereign citizen and posse comitatus crap) isn't white supremacist politics. Of course, Cain is saavy enough to have a white guy write the piece, but it's clear.

Kira, the Aunt Jamima scarf is unnecessary. We get it. You're in a long line of collaborators, quislings, judas goats, minstrels, human yard jockeys, bamboozled bigots, mascots, and jackasses feeding at the racist money tit. I think we covered most of the Uncle Toms, Clarence Thomas being the worst offender, but lets not leave out Juan Williams and Bill Cosby, the go to blacks for wordy rationalizations of hate.

You may be right about Carson, but my money is on the possibility that money and power will trump religious upbringing, as it always does. Mental gymnastics are much easier to perform when these two things are are located at the end of one's "dismount."

Chauncey, second fastest was ALAN KEYES. Right Wing Watch this morning quoted him from a World Net Daily interview that liberals and progressives are the real racists; Bundy was only pointing out the truth. Bundy, apparently, was not "talking about black folks," but about the "harm and damage done that the leftist socialism has done to blacks." He also blamed "leftist liberalism" and "hard leftist ideology."

I think you may have misinterpreted my post. I don't agree with Keyes on anything. I was summarizing and paraphrasing what Keyes had said rather than quoting extensively. The first time I tried to insert a long quote, it was all blacked and lined out, so I did what I did to convey what Keyes was saying. Keyes is one of the most dangerous of the black conservatives because he goes way out to the extreme.

I understood you were not agreeing with Keyes about Bundy. I thought we read the same story about the Bundy ranch setting up a party for black people and Latino's. That was the WND piece I read about Bundy.

Wow. With that handkerchief she's straight out of central casting; they needed a Tom; here you go.

What Cliven Bundy -- hell of a name -- said didn't surprise me. Given his political orientation it also follows that he would such views.

But this woman going on about "freedom" glosses over the facts that, when taken as they are, make Bundy out not to be some "patriot" but a tax scofflaw trying to get away with paying a debt. There is no question who owns the land his cattle graze on. His family bought that land in 1948, not "centuries" ago. Other ranchers in the area pay the fees with no problem, which are ridiculously low, amounting to about $3.00 per head of cattle per year. There is nothing "constitutional" nor no definition of "freedom" that says if anyone "feels" a law is unjust then, "by God," they do not have to obey it. I wake up one day and say it is unjust for me to stop at red lights, so I'm just going to drive right through them. Okay...

Who really benefitted from introducing race into this (and not that it really wasn't always about race, at bottom) was Bundy and his supporters, because now they can skip over answering some basic questions about this issue that expose Bundy simply as a deadbeat trying to get out of paying what he owes, like everyone else. His family has been threatening BLM employees with violence for some time now, so of course the feds are going to come prepared. Then, they put out a call for all these domestic terrorists to come, armed to the teeth, to stand by this fool, and yet its the government who is wrong to come armed in response.

The facts simply do not support Bundy's claim, nor that of his supporters. But there's nothing new in that either. And pathetically, neither is Ms. Tom, handkerchief securely in place, whitewashing the facts to buck dance in Bundy's ideological front yard.

"Religion" for the right wing is really a marker for tribalism. And the bottom line of that tribalism is white supremacy. They will bend and shape "Christianity" to suit whatever it is their tribe needs.

Arizona banned that book with a bunch of Latino/Chicano literature last year. They said the promote anti-white hate. Former Indiana governor tried to ban it at Purdue University when he became president there also.

I read through Fox News.com that there was a former Shoshone chief who back in 2002 had his cattle auctioned by the BLM. The author was comparing the Bundy case with Raymond Yowell's (The Shoshone).

Where is Yowell's support from mainstream conservatism? He's still fighting the BLM to resolve his issue. The cases are very different, Yowell having used reservation land that the US claims is still their jurisdiction.

Where are they when POC are getting the brunt of maltreatment at the hands of the government (and private enterprise)? They're telling them they deserve it, should work harder, should have figured something else out, that white people/America had nothing to do with their problems and they need to figure it out on their own and leave good white people alone.

About 20 years ago I was somewhat apolitical and I had just finished an enlistment in the Marines. All of my peers were Republicans so it just seemed to fit. Secondly, I was raised near Philadelphia in a white blue collar Roman Catholic family so Rush was held in very high esteem because of his outspoken pro life opinions. Throughout the 1990's I became even further enmeshed in conservative politics. I subscribed to National Review and Chronicles magazine and when the internet became widespread I read Newsmax and Lew Rockwell regularly. I eventually joined the Free State Project and was big supporter of Ron Paul due to his stance on the Iraq War. I think what attracted me to all of that is that conservatives try to speak to non college educated people like myself like I had a brain. The fact of the matter is that most of what I was given was ideology and was given it very subtly. I've sinced moved away from all of that in the last 12 years from reading your columns, T aNahesi Coates and Tim Wise among others.

No, but several siblings are still into conservative politics. I think myself and my younger brother are the only ones that keep all of that stuff at arm's length. My younger brother ,having studied sociology and urban planning at Temple University ,saw through a lot of conservative politics many years ago.

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Who is Chauncey DeVega?

I have been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Sirius XM's Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.

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I am a contributing writer for Salon and Alternet.

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